Nurses Again Outpace Other Professions for Honesty, Ethics

Story Highlights

Nurses rated highest for honesty and ethics for 17th consecutive year

Members of Congress and telemarketers rated lowest

Journalists' ethics rating hits high of 33%, up 10 points since 2016

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- More than four in five Americans (84%) again rate the honesty and ethical standards of nurses as "very high" or "high," earning them the top spot among a diverse list of professions for the 17th consecutive year. At the same time, members of Congress are again held in the lowest esteem, as nearly 58% of Americans say they have "low" or "very low" ethical standards. Telemarketers join members of Congress as having a majority of low/very low ratings.

Gallup has measured the public's views of the honesty and ethical standards of a variety of occupations since 1976. While the list changes from year to year, some professions have been included consistently over the past four decades.

Majorities of Americans also rate four other professions as having "high" or "very high" honesty and ethical standards in the Dec. 3-12 poll: medical doctors (67%), pharmacists (66%), high school teachers (60%) and police officers (54%).

Twelve of the remaining 13 occupations receive "average" ratings for their honesty and ethical standards from pluralities or majorities ranging from 42% to 54%. Among them, those garnering majority "average" marks for their honesty and ethical standards are real estate agents (54%) and lawyers (51%).

The ethics rating of journalists this year is split, with roughly equal thirds of the public saying they have very high/high, average or low/very low ethical standards.

Since 1976, Gallup has asked Americans to rate the ethical standards of journalists 29 times, and the overall average positive rating over that period is 26%. Until 2016, strong pluralities or majorities rated journalists as "average," but after the 2016 presidential campaign, the public's ratings of journalists declined. In December 2016, 41% of Americans held a negative opinion of their ethics.

Yet this year, positive assessments of journalists' ethical standards have rebounded, owed largely to shifting opinions of Democrats and independents, who may be reacting to President Donald Trump's repeated characterizations of the news media as "the enemy of the people."

Democrats' very high/high rating of journalists' honesty has jumped 21 points since 2016 to 54% this year. For their part, political independents' views have shifted from a 42% low and a 20% high ethics rating to roughly one-third each now saying journalists have high, average and low ethics. At the same time, Republicans' views are essentially unchanged, with 61% now giving journalists low ethics ratings.

Partisans' Ratings of Journalists' Honesty and Ethical Standards

Very high/High

Average

Low/Very low

%

%

%

2018

Republicans

10

27

61

Independents

31

32

34

Democrats

54

33

12

2016

Republicans

15

22

63

Independents

20

35

42

Democrats

33

46

21

Gallup

Clergy's Ethical Rating Continues to Decline

While journalists have experienced a surge in positive ratings, the opposite is true for the clergy. Gallup has measured Americans' views of the clergy's honesty and ethics 34 times beginning in 1977, and this year's 37% very high/high rating is the lowest to date. Although the overall average positive rating is 54%, it has consistently fallen below that level since 2009. The historical high of 67% occurred in 1985.

Positive views of the honesty and ethics of the clergy dropped in 2002 amid a sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, and although positive ratings rebounded somewhat in the next few years, they fell to 50% in 2009 and have been steadily declining since 2012.

These latest low ratings of the clergy come on the heels of more investigations into child sex abuse by Catholic priests in the U.S. Currently, 31% of Catholics and 48% of Protestants rate the clergy positively.

Bottom Line

Healthcare workers, including nurses, medical doctors and pharmacists, continue to earn the highest ratings from Americans for their honesty and ethical standards.

One notable change this year is that one-third of Americans now rate the honesty and ethics of journalists highly, marking a 10-point jump since 2016 to a level not seen in four decades. This change is largely driven by Democrats, and although it is a positive change, journalists have a long way to go before reaching the ratings of highly esteemed nurses.

While journalists are rated less positively than the clergy overall, they are at least showing improvement, whereas the public's views of the honesty and ethics of the clergy continue to decline after the U.S. Catholic Church was rocked again this year by more abuse scandals.

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Dec. 3-12, 2018, with a random sample of 1,025 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.

Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 70% cellphone respondents and 30% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.